Where the manuals disagree

Reading 289 cooking values off the official manuals of 38 air fryers across 15 brands makes something visible that no single manual can show: the manufacturers do not agree with each other, and several do not agree with themselves. This page is the register. There are 19 cases where two brands publish times that cannot both be right for the same food at the same displayed temperature, and 30 where one brand's own models contradict each other. Nothing here is corrected, averaged or resolved. Both figures stay on the site, each with its own source.

The five most striking of these are written up as a story in our guide to why cook times vary so much between brands. This page is the complete list, rebuilt from the data every time the site is published, so it cannot quietly fall behind the corpus.

How a disagreement is counted

Two manuals printing different numbers is not automatically a contradiction — they may be cooking different weights, at different temperatures, of things that only share a name. So the bar here is deliberately narrow:

• Same food. Both values map to the same entry in our food list, which is normalised by hand from the manual's own wording, not by pattern matching.
• Same displayed temperature. This is the strictest part. A brand cooking at 160 °C and one cooking at 204 °C are giving different instructions, not disagreeing.
• Ranges that do not overlap. If one manual says 15–20 minutes and another says 18–25, they agree well enough. Only ranges with no shared minute at all are logged.
• Different brands for the first register, the same brand for the second.

Everything below is manufacturer data — read from an official manual or product page, not measured by us. That label is the point: these are the numbers the companies themselves publish.

The register: brand against brand

19 cells, sorted by how far apart the two ends land. The ratio compares the midpoints of the two published ranges.

Chicken breast: 180 °C on both dials, three times the time

This is the widest gap in the corpus and the easiest to state. Tower's T17088 says a chicken breast takes 10–15 minutes at 180 °C; Tefal's EY855D40 says 30–40 minutes at the same 180 °C. Between them sit twelve other charts at that one temperature, nine of them clustered at 15–20 minutes. Tefal's chart covers 200–900 g, which is a wider and heavier load than most, and that explains part of the gap — but Philips publishes 15–25 minutes for one to five breasts of around 160 g each, a comparable load, at the same temperature. Weight alone does not get you from 15 minutes to 40.

Tefal's own smaller models are not outliers: the EY2454G0 and EY501 both print 12–19 minutes. So this is not a house style, it is one chart. See chicken breast for all fourteen values with their manual pages.

Chicken wings: 180 °C, and a 50% spread

Breville UK's Halo VDF126 asks 30–35 minutes for 1 kg of wings at 180 °C. Russell Hobbs asks 23–28 minutes at the same temperature, identically across all five of its Satisfry models. Russell Hobbs publishes no weight for that row at all, which is part of why the comparison is hard rather than a reason to dismiss it: the reader has no way to know whether the two charts assume the same load. Both figures are on the chicken wings page with their sources.

Pork chops: Russell Hobbs against Russell Hobbs

The most useful disagreement in the corpus is not between two competitors. Four Russell Hobbs Satisfry models — the 27680 among them — print a flat 22 min at ~356 °F for a pork chop. The Satisfry Small 26500 prints 10–15 min at ~392 °F — a higher temperature and roughly half the time, for the same food, from the same company.

The likeliest explanation is a recipe card that was not updated when the rest of the range was, but the manuals do not say, and we are not going to decide on the manufacturer's behalf. Both values stay published. It also has a practical consequence for anyone reading a chart: a cooking time from one model of a range is not transferable to another model of the same range, even when the manufacturer markets them as one product line.

When the disagreement is about the dial, not the clock

The register above holds temperature fixed by design, which means it is blind to the opposite kind of disagreement: brands that broadly agree on how long something takes and disagree completely on how hot to run. Bacon is the clearest case, and it never appears in the table above for exactly that reason.

Cosori's CAF-L501-KUS reaches a crisp rasher in 8 minutes at 160 °C. Cuisinart's toaster ovens want 204 °C for 8–12 minutes, Typhur wants 205 °C for 10, and Ninja's AF400UK wants 220 °C for 6. That is a 60 °C spread of dial settings, all aiming at the same visual result, all in a similar handful of minutes. Either these appliances move air very differently at low temperature, or the four companies simply calibrate "crisp" differently. No manual explains which, and there is no safety threshold to arbitrate it — bacon is the one common food on this site with no USDA internal temperature at all.

Bacon is not alone. 9 foods in the corpus carry a spread of 30 °C or more between the coldest and hottest setting any brand publishes for them — the widest being salmon fillet, where Tefal EY2454G0 sets 140 °C and Gourmia GAF858 sets 232 °C.

The register: one brand against itself

30 cases where two models from the same manufacturer publish times for the same food that do not overlap. Temperature is not held fixed here — a brand changing both the temperature and the time between two of its own models is exactly what this register is for.

The spread we refuse to call a disagreement

Prawns produce the widest numbers in the entire corpus and we do not publish them as a contradiction. Here is why.

Ninja's quick-start guide gives 3–4 minutes for 16 jumbo prawns (165 g) at 200 °C. Russell Hobbs gives a flat 12 minutes at 160 °C on its Satisfry Small and 15 minutes at 180 °C on its 5 L model, with no weight published for either. Chefman's smallest model gives 12 minutes at 204 °C for 907 g, while its own dual gives 4–5 minutes at the same temperature for 312 g. On the face of it that is the biggest disagreement on the site — and it is almost certainly not one. "Shrimp" in these charts covers raw and pre-cooked, peeled and shell-on, breaded and bare, at sizes no manual harmonises. Several of the rows say so in their own notes. A three-fold gap between a raw jumbo prawn and a frozen breaded one is not two companies contradicting each other; it is two companies describing different food.

Our own cross-manual analysis flagged this before publication and told us not to publish it as a disagreement without re-reading every source row. We have not done that yet, so it stays here, labelled as unresolved. The same caution removed a second case: a supposed basket-versus-oven gap on thick-cut chips turned out to be comparing frozen chips against frozen potato wedges — the detail is on the basket versus oven page.

The one disagreement where we take a side

Everything above is about texture, and on texture we publish both numbers and let you choose. Safety is different, and there is exactly one case in the corpus. A recipe inside the Cuisinart TOA-60 manual tells you to cook salmon to an internal temperature of 125 °F (52 °C). The USDA's threshold for fish is 145 °F (63 °C) — twenty degrees Fahrenheit higher.

Read fairly, 125 °F is a deliberate choice: it produces medium-rare salmon, a texture plenty of cooks aim for with fresh fish, and it appears in a recipe rather than in a safety statement. The same manual cites 165 °F for chicken four separate times, correctly. But it is not the number this site will display. Salmon shows 63 °C here, on every appliance, whatever any manual recommends — the full reasoning is in our guide to USDA internal temperatures, and the separation between texture data and safety data is written into the data model itself.

What to do with all this

The practical conclusion is short. A cooking time is a manufacturer's opinion about texture, and manufacturers disagree — with each other, and sometimes with themselves across one product range. Use the chart for your own exact model, start checking at the low end of whatever range it gives, and for anything with a safety threshold, use a probe thermometer rather than a timer.

Register rebuilt from 289 published values across 38 appliances at the last site build. Every value links to the appliance page carrying its manual reference, page number and source URL.